The Road Not Taken

By Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both the morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

 The last thought piece we made is about the definition of art based on Leo Tolstoy’s
perception, so again, art is a bridge or a connection between the artist and the spectators wherein
they both achieved the mutual understanding and mutual feeling of the art conveys. And with
this definition we can able to determine if an art is a high form or low form. But this definition of
art is a contrary on how an art is described and analyzed through formalism. Formalism in art is
defined as a way of comparing and analyzing an art through its styles and form wherein it
focuses on the shapes, lines, colors, and textures of an art work. So, formalism tackles only the
structural composition of an art and it does not signify or consider outside influences such as the
artist’s feelings when creating an art or the artist’s historical background.

Formalism in art can be also applied to literature since literature is also an art. In
analyzing a literature using the formalist approach can be vary according to what kind of
literature it is, for example, in poetry we focus on its rhythms, measures, number of lines in a
stanza, etc. The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost is a good example of a poetry that can be
criticize using formalism. The poem is called a quintet for it is composed of four stanzas and
fives lines in each stanza. A quintet poem can be still classified depending on its rhyme scheme,
the poem above is a Spanish quintet for its rhyme scheme is A-B-A-A-B. The measurement of a
quintet can be varied depending upon the will of its author as long as it has four stanzas with five
lines each. The meter of the poem varies from eight to ten syllables per line making it a free
verse poetry since it doesn’t have a fixed meter on its verses. Formalism approach goes that kind
of way and it does not consider what feelings the spectator would get and if there is a connection
existing between the author and the reader, as long as it has the structures composing a poem it
will be considered as an art.

As a realization, formalism in art breaks the norms on how should an art be good or not
since it just only focuses on the structure of it and not on the message it wants to convey. And
the essence of having or putting emotions into an artwork would no longer be useful and with
that the value of an art would be lessen. In short, everything under the sun can be considered as
an art, the trees, the wind, humans, and even human manures. But for me art cannot be looked
and criticized in this way, considering the explanation of Leo Tolstoy in his work “What is
Art?” chapter five wherein he explained that the communion of man making him create a
civilize society was because of art, since it helped us to communicate to one another. In
formalism we just judge the book by its cover and no longer seek for its contents.